Grammar Guide

Oh, those foreign phrases

If I were ever a contestant on “Jeopardy!,” you would probably never hear me say, “I’ll take ‘Foreign Words and Phrases’ for $1600, Alex.” Like a lot of English speakers and writers, I often mess up on words from other languages.

I just ran across this in a piece of copy: objects d’art. I thought it was spelled objets d’art, but, of course, I wasn’t sure. So I looked it up, something professional copy editors do many times a day. Indeed, it’s objets d’art. It’s easy to let this slip by, I’d say. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English has an entry about objet d’art.